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A passing steamer noted in its log on December 15, 1900, that the light on Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides, was dark. Storms kept the relief boat away until December 26. Joseph Moore went ashore alone and found the gate and the door shut, the beds unmade, the clock stopped, the lamps cleaned and refilled, and one set of oilskins still hanging inside. - Read the rest The post Three lighthouse keepers vanished and left the clock unwound appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the morning of May 19, 1780, the sky over New England went dark enough that people burned candles from noon on. In Ipswich, Massachusetts, the roosters and the frogs started up at two in the afternoon as though night had arrived. - Read the rest The post New England needed candles at noon and nobody knew why appeared first on Boing Boing.

For more than a century, people have grumbled that dropped bread always lands butter-side down and chalked it up to plain pessimism. When the BBC science show Q.E.D. tossed toast into the air in 1991, it landed butter-down only half the time - exactly what chance predicts. - Read the rest The post Toast really does land butter-side down, and physics explains why appeared first on Boing Boing.

Algeria pulled off one of the great World Cup upsets in 1982, beating reigning European champions West Germany 2-1 - the first African or Arab team ever to beat a European team at the tournament.Algeria finished its group games a day before West Germany played Austria, so both European teams took the field knowing that a West German win by one or two goals would send both through and eliminate Algeria. - Read the rest The post Two teams quit competing mid-game, and FIFA rewrote the rules appeared first on Boing Boing.

For sixty years, oceanographers had a research vessel that deliberately capsized itself. FLIP, short for Floating Instrument Platform, was a 355-foot ship that would flood its stern and pitch backward 90 degrees until it floated straight up and down. The front 55 feet stayed above water; the other 300 feet were suspended in deep, calm water, which made the platform almost immune to passing waves. - Read the rest The post This 355-foot research ship worked by flipping vertical in the ocean appeared first on Boing Boing.

Bertram "Bertie" Sheldrake ran his family's pickle factory in southeast London, converted to Islam as a teenager in 1903, and took the name Khalid. He founded mosques in Peckham and Dulwich, edited Muslim journals, and once converted a biscuit heiress to Islam aboard a chartered airliner over the English Channel. - Read the rest The post A London pickle maker was crowned king of a breakaway state in China appeared first on Boing Boing.

On October 22, 1895, a steam locomotive smashed through the upper-floor wall of a Paris railway station and came to rest on its nose in the street below. The photograph of the Montparnasse derailment is one of the most famous images in the history of transportation. - Read the rest The post In 1895 a train burst through a Paris station and stood on its nose appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tobi Lutke, CEO of online commerce giant Shopify, endorsed banker Eric Thor's suggestion for a "weighted voting proportional to the amount of income tax you pay." Moreover, he wrote, the poor and pensioners should have their right to vote stripped entirely: "Now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. - Read the rest The post Shopify CEO endorses stripping voting rights from poor and pensioners appeared first on Boing Boing.

If large corporations are supposed to prefer subtle and well-lawyered forms of misconduct, no-one told Ebay, whose global security team ended up facing criminal charges over their unhinged harassment campaign against Ina and David Steiner, two journalists who criticized the company. - Read the rest The post Ebay and former execs to pay $55.7m after harassment campaign against journalists appeared first on Boing Boing.

Having shown the massive star Betelgeuse as an indistinct blob, astronomers at the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert have now imaged its long-suspected companion star, proving that the bloated supergiant is not alone."This is the conclusion of a century-long quest," wrote Miguel Montarges of the Observatoire de Paris. - Read the rest The post Supergiant Betelgeuse's smaller companion star imaged appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Get aMicrosoft Project Professional 2024 Lifetime Licensefor $44.97 through Aug. 2 (MSRP $1,129) and plan projects with Gantt charts, built-in reports, automatic scheduling, timesheets, and a one-time purchaseEveryone thinks they're good at project management until Task No. - Read the rest The post Your spreadsheet has officially been promoted-Microsoft Project is $44.97 right now appeared first on Boing Boing.

While it remains unclear whether Raygun was just a classless incompetent with a terrible sense of humor or the world's worst breakdancer, Netflix wants to find out.Untold Sports, which is described as "critically acclaimed" in the Netflix-authored article where I first heard of it, will be running a segment on the notorious Olympics crasher. - Read the rest The post Netflix honors Raygun with a documentary appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace's father lived through two world wars, the jet age, the moon landing and the rise of mass commercial aviation."There weren't airplanes in those days, I don't think," says the United States Moron in Chief. He's right about one thing: he doesn't think. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains says airplanes didn't exist during his father's lifetime appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tourists staged a photo shoot on the railway tracks leading into Auschwitz-Birkenau, where deportation trains carried thousands of people to their deaths.Video shows a woman posing on the tracks, adjusting her hair and changing postures while two companions photograph her. - Read the rest The post Tourists turned Auschwitz's death tracks into a photo set appeared first on Boing Boing.

Lil' Marco and Donald clearly hate Iran's anti-war propaganda. The Iranians just keep cranking out bangers...The LEGO diaper is really a chef's kiss.Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.Previously:

Evangelist Whitney Lynn has found the perfect audience: people strapped into seats several miles above the ground."I just love a captive audience," she wrote after preaching to roughly 200 passengers trapped aboard a commercial flight she happened to be on. - Read the rest The post Disruptive preacher boasts that 200 trapped airline passengers heard her sermon appeared first on Boing Boing.

With AI datacenters gobbling up all the available memory, spec sheets have stalled and system builders are making the most of what they can get. 8GB of RAM (system or GPU) is fine! But the latest AMD-based video card coming with just 4GB of VRAM in its entry-level model marks a clear step down: it's "the first modern GPU to ship" with so little memory, writes William Judd. - Read the rest The post New video card has only 4GB of RAM appeared first on Boing Boing.

Three times in Prague's history, a political dispute ended with someone being thrown out a high window. It happened often enough that the English word "defenestrate" - to hurl someone from a window - entered the language describing the Defenestrations of Prague. - Read the rest The post Prague settled political fights by throwing officials out windows appeared first on Boing Boing.

PocketByte is a modular handheld good for retrogaming, listening to music, watching videos or assisting you with your personal digits. It's all very chunky and retro; the keyboard, game controls or clickwheel modules plug into the main unit, which has a 2.8-inch 320*240 display, an ESP32 microcontroller, 8 megabytes of RAM and a microSD card slot for mass storage. - Read the rest The post PocketByte: a modular handheld gadget for "play, life, and tinkering" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:GetBabbel Language Learningfor just $159 through Aug. 16 (MSRP $299) with the StackSocial code LEARN and unlock 14 languages with one payment.There's a certain confidence that comes from ordering lunch in another language without immediately pointing at the menu and hoping for the best. - Read the rest The post Become suspiciously good at ordering coffee abroad with this Babbel deal from StackSocial appeared first on Boing Boing.

Sky surveys keep catching a kind of cosmic explosion that astronomers can't explain. They call them fast blue optical transients, or FBOTs: blasts as luminous as a supernova, or brighter, but flaring and fading far faster, and glowing a distinctive blue. - Read the rest The post These cosmic blasts outshine supernovas and no one knows what they are appeared first on Boing Boing.

An electronic road sign in Portland, Maine, was reprogrammed Monday to show the message "NO MORE ICE KILLINGS." Staff at WGMA write that the sign was on Brighton Avenue there and belongs to a local sand and gravel company.Roadsign sign text is often easy to edit. - Read the rest The post Road sign reprogrammed to protest ICE killings appeared first on Boing Boing.

When a patient's cornea is too scarred for a donor transplant to take - after a chemical burn, say, or Stevens-Johnson syndrome - surgeons have a fallback: they build a new window for the eye out of one of the patient's own teeth. - Read the rest The post Surgeons can rebuild an eye's window out of one of your own teeth appeared first on Boing Boing.

The rules of ferret-legging are simple. You tie your trouser legs shut at the ankles, drop in two live ferrets, cinch your belt so they can't climb out the top, and stand in front of the judges for as long as you can bear it. - Read the rest The post The endurance sport where you drop live ferrets down your pants appeared first on Boing Boing.

Long Boi was a duck who lived by the University of York's Derwent College and stood noticeably taller than every other bird on the pond - an Indian Runner-mallard cross about 70 centimeters high. In 2021 a Reddit post wrongly billed him as the tallest mallard ever, at over a meter, and he went viral anyway. - Read the rest The post This unusually tall duck went viral and got a bronze statue appeared first on Boing Boing.

In August 1996, someone posted hundreds of messages full of gibberish into Usenet, the network of discussion groups that predated the web. Each message had the same subject line: "Markovian Parallax Denigrate." Nobody has ever established who sent them or why. - Read the rest The post In 1996, hundreds of gibberish messages flooded Usenet unexplained appeared first on Boing Boing.

A 30-foot tree trunk has been floating upright in Oregon's Crater Lake since at least 1896, when a geologist first wrote it down. Known as the Old Man of the Lake, it's most likely a hemlock, about two feet across at the waterline, and it stands roughly four feet out of the water, its exposed top bleached white and worn smooth. - Read the rest The post A tree has been floating upright in this lake since 1896 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Taylor Farms is the suspected source of the "diarrhea lettuce" linked to the ongoing outbreak of Cyclosporiasis, now entering more states as it exits more American guts. Taco Bell was just the first outlet to go public, though, and Taylor Farms has many other customers. - Read the rest The post The many brands of Taylor Farms, suspected source of America's diarrhea lettuce appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to the book of Genesis, the legendary Tower of Babel was built by mankind and destroyed by God. On the internet, though, it's being rebuilt to celebrate Wikipedia: every time someone edits a page, a new brick is added. - Read the rest The post Online Tower of Babel gets a new brick for every Wikipedia edit appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of police technology in use across the United States: enter your city, county, state or the name of a local law enforcement agency, and it will tell you what's in their toybox.Pittsburgh, for example, has the expensive and mostly useless Shotspotter system and dozens of Flock cameras, ostensibly for license-plate tracking but functionally a general-purpose (and widely-abused) surveillance network. - Read the rest The post Look up your local cops on the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance appeared first on Boing Boing.

Electronic Plastic is an online museum with pictures and info of more than 900 handheld electronic games of the retro kind, as collected by Jaro Gielens, who has been collecting them since 1981. Every entry is from his personal library and he kept the original package for all of them. - Read the rest The post Online museum of handheld electronic games appeared first on Boing Boing.

Hypercard, the point-and-click software development tool designed by Bill Atkinson for classic Macs, helped a generation of non-coders make and share their own apps and games. Decker is a modern implementation for the web, and goes the extra mile in mimicking the user interface and experience of monochrome-era Macintoshes^1. - Read the rest The post Decker is Hypercard for the modern web appeared first on Boing Boing.

Gray Area in San Francisco hands its Grand Theater to the 1990s techno-counterculture on August 12 and 13, when R.U. Sirius and the crowd behind the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 stage their second Deliria gathering - two days of film, talks, music, and performance. - Read the rest The post Cyberpunks, mutants, and mondoids gather in San Francisco in August appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Thislifetime license to Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2026makes coding a lot easier, and right now it's on sale for just $29.97 (MSRP $499.99) until August 9.Behind every great app or website is a developer with equally great tools. - Read the rest The post Create apps and websites with this powerful Microsoft coding tool -now only $30 through August 9 appeared first on Boing Boing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson says he grows more confident "with each passing day" that Republicans will retain control of Congress.His reason: "This is a God thing. We have intercessory prayers who are on the ground at the Capitol praying." - Read the rest The post MAGA Mike shares the Republican plan for midterm success: intercessory prayer appeared first on Boing Boing.

For anyone still insisting Elon Musk was merely "sending his heart to the audience", the neo-Nazis on the left of the clip have prepared a demonstration.The Neo- Nazi footage comes from the September 2023 "Red Shirts March" in Orlando, billed as a show of unity for neo-Nazis. - Read the rest The post Actual neo-Nazis demonstrate Elon Musk's heartfelt salute appeared first on Boing Boing.

Two men rode to the Space Needle's observation deck, changed into BASE-jumping gear in the restroom, climbed over the glass barrier, and backflipped from the 520-foot platform. Their parachutes opened; Seattle police are still looking for them. Yet another great PNW parachute getaway. - Read the rest The post Two men rode the elevator to the top of the Space Needle and jumped off appeared first on Boing Boing.

The autopsies were still pending when anti-vax front "Children's Health Defense" filed a lawsuit declaring that vaccines killed Andrea Shaw's twins and that the homicide investigation was itself evidence of medical corruption. Five months later, Shaw was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder. - Read the rest The post Woman charged with smothering her twins claims the vaccines did it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Three people allegedly used a rifle, fake badges, tactical vests, and roof-mounted police lights to pull over a driver, force them into an SUV, and assault them. While the victim was at the hospital, a "law firm" began texting about representation for the detention. - Read the rest The post ICE made its costume easy to counterfeit appeared first on Boing Boing.

In the 19th-century Kingdom of Travancore, in what is now Kerala, India, every lower-caste person owed a poll tax starting around age 14. The tax on men was called talakkaram, "head tax," or meeshakkaram, "moustache tax." The tax on women was mulakkaram - "breast tax." - Read the rest The post The legend of India's "breast tax" and the woman who defied it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Beata Siemionkowicz had lived legally in the United States for decades when ICE agents grabbed her from a backyard garden and shoved her into a car. She has now spent 51 weeks in detention over misdemeanor cases her family says were cleared up years ago. - Read the rest The post ICE arrested a green-card holder while she was gardening and kept her for a year appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2005, scholars revealed a fragment of papyrus 115 containing the earliest known copy of the passage in the Book of Revelation that names the Number of the Beast. It doesn't say 666. It says 616.Most manuscripts of Revelation 13:18 give the famous 666, and that's the number that made it into heavy metal, horror movies, and highway-exit folklore. - Read the rest The post The oldest surviving Book of Revelation says the beast's number is 616 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Have more money to spend on fun during your next vacation thanks to thisaloSIM Traveler's Mobile Data Plan, now just $69.99 (MSRP $150).Heading abroad? If you'd like to avoid coming home to a mountain of roaming charges, it's time to consider analoSIM Traveler's Mobile Data Plan. - Read the rest The post Spend $70 and get $150 worth of data with this lifetime eSIM that helps you dodge roaming charges appeared first on Boing Boing.

In June 1979, a single called "Ready 'n' Steady" by an artist listed only as "D.A." spent three weeks on Billboard's Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart, peaking at number 102. Then it vanished. Chart historian Joel Whitburn, whose company collected every 45 ever to hit the Hot 100 or Bubbling Under charts, spent decades hunting for it - the one record he couldn't find. - Read the rest The post A song charted on Billboard in 1979 without ever being released appeared first on Boing Boing.

In November 1997, the world learned that the byte sequence F0 0F C7 C8 would stop any original Pentium, Pentium MMX, or Pentium OverDrive.ThePentium F00F bugmade it so that any program that executed the four bytes would halt the processor. - Read the rest The post Four bytes could freeze any Pentium in 1997 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Early in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987), the player walks into a house in the town of Ruto, where a bearded man in a purple tunic announces: "I am Error." For decades, gamers filed it alongside "All your base are belong to us" as botched translation. - Read the rest The post "I am Error" was never a mistranslation - it was a programmer's joke appeared first on Boing Boing.

In early 1900s Germany, a math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten toured the country withClever Hans, a horse who could apparently add, subtract, multiply, divide, tell time, and answer questions like "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?" - Read the rest The post The math-solving horse who fooled scientists still haunts AI research appeared first on Boing Boing.

Look closely at a lot of 15th- and 16th-century European portraits and you'll find a housefly sitting on the frame, the sitter's sleeve, or a page of an open book - painted so precisely it looks like a real insect that landed on the picture. - Read the rest The post Renaissance painters kept adding a realistic fly to their portraits appeared first on Boing Boing.

John I of France, called the Posthumous, was born on November 15, 1316, and died on November 19, 1316. He's the youngest person ever to be king of France, the only one to be king from birth, and the only one to hold the title for his entire life. - Read the rest The post France once had a king who reigned for four days - his entire life appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Pay once forMicrosoft Office Pro 2021and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, and more - plus a free 25-hour Microsoft training bundle - for $29.97.Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook - most of us use at least one of them every week. - Read the rest The post Microsoft Office Pro 2021 is down to $29.97, plus free training appeared first on Boing Boing.